Principal Engineer - Platform

About Faculty

Faculty transforms organisational performance through safe, impactful and human-led AI. 

We are Europe’s leading applied AI company, and saw its potential a decade ago - long before the current hype cycle. 

We founded in 2014 with our Fellowship programme, training academics to become commercial data scientists. 

Today, we provide over 300 global customers with industry-leading software, and bespoke AI consultancy for retail, healthcare, energy, and governmental organisations, as well as our award winning Fellowship. 

Our expertise and safety credentials are such that OpenAI asked us to be their first technical partner, helping customers deploy cutting-edge generative AI safely. 

Our high-impact work has saved lives through forecasting NHS demand during covid, produced green energy by routing boats towards the wind, slashed marketing spend by predicting customer spending habits, and kept children safe online. 

AI is an epoch-defining technology. We want people to join us who can help our customers reap its enormous benefits safely.

About the Role

We're actively seeking a highly skilled Principal Engineer to drive our cutting-edge product, Frontier. This pivotal role combines technical prowess with a customer-centric approach, as you collaborate directly with internal stakeholders across Faculty to implement Frontier.

As we continue to expand our platform's reach, you'll have the unique opportunity to build a scalable AI focussed product, whilst leading the way in best technical practices. 

In this role, you'll be immersed in hands-on work, tackling complex real-world challenges using state-of-the-art technology. From optimising bed management in healthcare institutions to addressing logistics in the military and supporting sustainability goals in various industries, Frontier empowers organisations to make informed decisions through AI-driven insights. As a leader within our Frontier Platform team, you'll play a key role in building the product to ensure the scalability for seamless deployment to multiple customers, leveraging your expertise to build robust infrastructure, integrate with operational systems, and craft intuitive and user-friendly front-ends. Join us on this exciting journey of transforming decision-making with AI and machine learning, revolutionising how businesses thrive utilising Decision Intelligence..

Role Responsibilities:

• Build and manage a small team of engineers, with a hands-on focus  on platform engineering, delivering and implementing Frontier as a scalable SaaS product.
• Establish and optimise engineering processes for designing, developing, and scaling customer-facing platform components, with a specific emphasis on Machine Learning systems.
• Collaborate with the Director of Delivery to ensure the successful SaaS deployment of Frontier by advising on roles, skills, and best practices within the platform engineering team.
• Mentor and upskill the existing engineering team in cloud operations, release management, and testing processes.
• Review the existing deployment process and provide recommendations on process and tooling improvements.
• Collaborate with the Delivery and Product/Engineering teams to update the support process to meet the need for support at scale.
• Provide support to the Director of Frontier Delivery and Machine Learning Engineers in the Delivery Teams in understanding specific integration issues with customer systems and processes, and establish processes for resilience to changes from customer infrastructure and product updates.

Minimum Requirements:

• Proven experience as an experienced developer with a strong background in platform engineering.
• Previous experience in a management or leadership role, with a passion for building and managing effective engineering teams.
• Significant expertise in designing, developing, and scaling platform components, preferably with a focus on Machine Learning systems.
• Proficiency in Python programming.
• Extensive knowledge of cloud operations, particularly in AWS.
• Experience working with IaC, preferably Terraform, and automation.

Preferred Skills:

• Experience in delivering SaaS products.
• Familiarity with React or other front-end languages.
• Understanding of software support, maintenance, and upgrade processes.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Excellent communication and team collaboration skills.

Culture & Benefits at Faculty

The Faculty team is diverse and distinctive, and we all come from different personal, professional and organisational backgrounds. We all have one thing in common: we are driven by a deep intellectual curiosity that powers us forward each day. This curiosity pushes us to seek truth and understanding in everything we do, to execute work in a nimble and pragmatic manner, to foster talent in one another and always to challenge assumptions.

Faculty is the professional challenge of a lifetime. You’ll be surrounded by an impressive group of brilliant minds working to achieve our collective goals. Our consultants, product developers, business development specialists, operations professionals and more all bring something unique to Faculty, and you’ll learn something new from everyone you meet. You’ll also have the opportunity to make your mark on a high-growth start-up now poised to expand internationally.

Fostering talent is one of our core values, it’s built into our culture and what we offer. Faculty was founded by people who are passionate about continuous learning, and adding value to our people.

Some of our benefits:

• Unlimited holidays: We encourage each other to use this time to take a break, work on personal projects, or to spend time with their friends and family.
• Genuinely flexible working: We believe people have needs, responsibilities and interests that require something different to a strict working day. We trust people to organise and take accountability for their own work and do our best to support their lives outside Faculty. We provide you with all you need to work from home, including a laptop, keyboard, chair…even Sony headphones!
• Equity: We want you to benefit from Faculty’s growth and success.
• Fantastic private health, optical and dental insurance for you & your family - including 24/7 unlimited virtual private GP appointments and covering pre-existing medical conditions.
• Access to mental health coaching with Sanctus
• Free breakfast, weekly lunches and more fruit, drinks and snacks than you could ever eat when you're in the office.
• We work hard and make sure we enjoy what we do. So we have frequent socials and informal get-togethers to help make sure you enjoy your time with us. You’ll make friends and professional connections that will last a lifetime.